Batman? Spider-Man? Good comic-book characters, with a few decent game appearances to their credit. Watchmen? Now you’re talking celebrated literature — and adapting that for the button-mashing audience is a little more challenging. So, taking its cue from the March movie, WB Games went deep into the fictional past for Watchmen: The End is Nigh. The problem is, while they were poking around in yesteryear, they left one major gameplay feature behind.

The End is Nigh explores the crime-fighting adventures of Rorschach and Nite Owl (voiced by screen actors Jackie Earl Haley and Patrick Wilson, respectively) in the days before the Keane Act outlawed vigilantes. When we sat down and thought about what kind of game we’d want from Watchmen, a street-brawling prequel was one of the only setups that made sense — it doesn’t mess with the dense narrative of the main story, and it sure sounds better than a super-deformed, bighead kart racer. Choosing either character, you’ll chain combos with timed presses of the X and Y buttons, occasionally using B to throw fools over your shoulder. Night Owl fights with trained martial arts techniques and can control crowds with gadgets like gas grenades and electric shocks, but Rorschach is scrappier and more violent as a one-on-one melee fighter. If you’re looking to bash burglars in the face with a crowbar or punch a thug in the junk before snapping some vertebrae, go with the man with the shifting mask. That’s why Rorschach has a Rage meter, while Nite Owl merely manages his Charge level.

The narrative is split into six chapters, starting with a prison break and the escape of a mobster named Underboss. It’s the same story for both characters, and it should take about 4 to 6 hours to complete, alone or split-screen on the couch. And that’s the big problem: No online co-op. Maybe it’s the accelerated schedule to get the game onto Arcade in time to promote the movie, maybe it’s a budget thing — but the characters don’t even have any team-up moves, let alone Live play. That’s disappointing.

The game does look surprisingly gorgeous for a downloadable — the atmospheric lighting and rainsoaked streets will make you ask, “This is XBLA?” — and the gameplay, while old-school and simplistic, already feels tuned. But a buddy game set in the past where you can’t go online to connect with buddies from your own past? Hurm. Time will tell…and the clock, as every Watchmen fan knows, is ticking.